I am thinking about getting into leasing desktops. First off, I don't plan on offering it to all of my clients. Only those that are quick to pay and I can trust to take care of the pc's. Here are my questions?

Do you currently or have you ever offered hardware leasing? If you did and no longer, why did you stop?

If you are/have, what profit margin did you try too keep at? I am looking at about 200% or so on a 3 year term with custom built pc's. Should I go Dell or HP?

What, if any, software have you used to keep track of your inventory. I plan on using both Meraki and LogMeIn to keep track of it.

Anything else you would like to add.

I am still on the fence if this is a good idea or bad and am just looking for some feedback.

I had looked into at various points over the years. SAM's right, check your local jurisdiction regarding taxes. I found it was just easier to discretely suggest either leasing directly through Dell (with us as the referral so we get our comms), or via a third party leasing agent (e-lease, etc)

I had looked into at various points over the years. SAM's right, check your local jurisdiction regarding taxes. I found it was just easier to discretely suggest either leasing directly through Dell (with us as the referral so we get our comms), or via a third party leasing agent (e-lease, etc)

We don't lease new gear, makes no sense. Can't possibly beat Dell or HP at that piece (except for small volumes where they won't play at all.) Instead we offer "forever leasing" of enterprise gear. Our goal isn't to make money on the leases but to enable our SMB customers to move into high quality, commercial HP and Dell gear in an affordable way that helps them to stay in business and encourages them to use us for their IT.

Exactly. Leasing may cost more in the long run, but for SMBs, having a fixed price every month goes a long way in budgeting. Not only do I worry less about a customer going out of business, I also don't need to worry about supporting PCs that are a decade old.

We have been thinking of this ourselves the last couple weeks & running the numbers. Many clients in a position where they can't afford the up-front investment needed to continue a solid lifecycle but infrastructure is crumbling. We want to find options to enable the client to make good choices, good purchases and get or stay out of the chasing problems in a crumbling infrastructure situation where a fiscal review makes it obvious the amount of money expended could have been an investment still paying dividends.

So often they can't seem to be persuaded to make a wise investment - or balk at the numbers or just flat can't come up with it right now - many still impacted from economic events that past couple years - and quickly are in or facing a position of chasing emergencies that eat up potential wise-investment money. We're trying to find ways to present alternatives to the hefty one-sum proposal and think this might be a way to give certain parties another option while taking care of what obviously needs to be attended to.

I have leased out servers. Weather it was a physical or virtual depended on the price. I kept the service contracts with Dell current that way the customer and I would know that the server/s would be maintained. In order to maintain a 99.9% up time I would host it in a rack at a nearby collocation. That way I would always have access to it when the labor was needed. I would factor in the cost of real estate the server was taking up in the rack and pass that down to the client as part of the maintenance and rental fees. I have also done NAS servers as a backup service to the clients. Those too were hosted in the collocation. I never really done the desktops.

Thanks for all of the feedback. Now I really have more to think about.

I will most likely still offer leasing, just cheaper than I planned. I have thought of doing server and network equipment leasing but as I am just starting out and am currently a one man shop, I don't have the capital/credit to do it currently. That is why I was planning on starting out with desktops.

I have leased out servers. Weather it was a physical or virtual depended on the price. I kept the service contracts with Dell current that way the customer and I would know that the server/s would be maintained. In order to maintain a 99.9% up time I would host it in a rack at a nearby collocation. That way I would always have access to it when the labor was needed. I would factor in the cost of real estate the server was taking up in the rack and pass that down to the client as part of the maintenance and rental fees. I have also done NAS servers as a backup service to the clients. Those too were hosted in the collocation. I never really done the desktops.

Yes. Basically that is what we were doing. It would allow the SMB's that we were supporting the option to have thier system hosted and maintained. At our peak of business we had two full racks. Virtualization allowed us to consolidate it to one full rack and add the NAS. For a two man team this made it easy to maintain instead of having to worry about servers going down during the weekend at the clients location. Plus during Ike our clients were able to remotely work as long as they had power.

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